Phoebe Wall Howard is the rare auto writer these days who doesn’t aspire to be a good stenographer. While many of her rivals, particularly those assigned to cover General Motors, prefer to uncritically regurgitate what the PR departments of the Detroit Three serve up, Howard likes to poke under their corporate hoods, talking to people who work at these companies and reading arcane regulatory filings.
Howard’s tenacity and insider relationships enabled her to break the story about the electrician at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville earning more than $200,000 a year who was fired after being falsely accused of stealing a $1.95 cookie from a vending machine, an incident I recently highlighted.
Howard ferreted out another exclusive last week, one that’s struck a nerve with labor, corporate governance experts, and anyone old enough to remember the once-revered antics of former GE chairman and CEO “Neutron Jack” Welch. Howard reported on a lawsuit filed by Tuan Le, a 27-year veteran GM engineer who alleges GM’s forced ranking HR model, which Welch championed and companies such as Microsoft, Ford, Goodyear and others abandoned years ago, is illegal age discrimination.
Alec Levenson, a University of Southern California labor professor and an authority on organizational performance and talent development, told Howard that GM’s HR practices are “boneheaded,” but he posted a more pointed comment on LinkedIn.
“When we talk about and teach some important lessons learned in the annals of leadership and organizational effectiveness, we hope that some of the worst practices have gone away for good,” Levenson wrote.
“Yet like the zombie that wouldn’t die … in 2026 we have General Motors implementing a forced ranking distribution system for what appears to be all the wrong reasons. Not that there is ever a legitimate basis for forced ranking that truly stands up to scrutiny in the light of day. But, based on (Howard’s) reporting, this seems to be particularly poorly implemented.
“Counting down the days until it’s removed and/or they lose a huge court case …”
GM’s HR strategy is known in polite company as “stacked ranking,” but the no-BS term for the practice is “rank and yank.” It was most famously implemented by Welch, who boasted about culling the bottom 10% of GE’s workforce every year. Welch also became famous for engineering earnings-per-share beats through massive share buybacks, aggressive portfolio pruning, and consistently meeting or exceeding Wall Street’s expectations—financial engineering that has likewise become central to GM under CEO Mary Barra. Like Welch in his prime, Barra has enjoyed years of overwhelmingly fawning business press coverage, with Fortune editor Alyson Shontell declaring in 2023, “she’s a top CEO regardless of gender.”
At GM, managers are required to designate 15% of their staff as either “Does Not Meet Expectations” or “Partially Meets Expectations,” Michael Pitt, the lawyer representing Tuan Le, told Howard. “We have statistics that older employees are disproportionately rated negatively and younger employees are disproportionately rated positively. This policy is biased against older people.”
GM and the UAW are already defending themselves against an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit alleging they violated federal law by negotiating a collective bargaining agreement that limited short-term disability payments to older workers receiving Social Security retirement benefits. The corporate media ignored the lawsuit, despite the EEOC’s allegations that the UAW discriminated against longstanding members who contributed most to the union’s membership coffers.
Although Barra fashions GM as a Silicon Valley-grade technology company on the cutting edge of AI adoption, flesh-and-blood executives still run the shop. The executive responsible for overseeing HR—carrying the official title of Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer—is Arden Hoffman, known derisively among rank-and-file workers on GM’s Reddit forum as “Hannah Montana.”
Hoffman acquired the moniker shortly after arriving in January 2023 from GM’s troubled and ultimately dismantled Cruise robotaxi unit. In an introductory video to staff, she cheerfully shared her excitement about joining the company while explaining she looked forward to dividing her time between Detroit, San Francisco, and Montana. The jet-setting tone stuck in the craw of Michigan employees, who were simultaneously being subjected to Barra’s strict return-to-office mandates and the elimination of Covid-era remote flexibility.
Hannah Montana notably is a Disney franchise, and Barra’s many side hustles include sitting on Disney’s board, for which she receives more than $360,000 in annual cash and benefits.
Federal campaign finance records shed light on where Hoffman calls home. Since 2022, her Federal Election Commission filings—which document contributions to Montana candidates alongside national Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris—consistently list her residential address in Whitefish, which the New York Times proclaimed, “has the kind of natural beauty tourists remember for the rest of their lives.”
While Whitefish is famed for its ski slopes, the surrounding Flathead Valley is a luxury enclave of multimillion-dollar ranch compounds and sprawling equestrian acreage favored by high-net-worth tech and finance elites. The optic of a Chief People Officer administering rigid in-person mandates and forced-ranking culls from a remote mountain haven perfectly encapsulates the cultural canyon between GM’s growing executive suite in California and its legacy Midwestern workforce.
Getting plucked by Barra to become GM’s Chief People Officer overseeing a global workforce of roughly 155,000 employees was a staggering leap for Hoffman, who is in her mid-fifties. At its peak, Cruise employed only about 4,000 workers—a cohort that one executive with knowledge of the business described as a “bunch of spoiled children.” When Cruise unraveled after running afoul of safety regulators, an independent investigation by outside law firm Quinn Emanuel cited poor leadership, flawed judgment, and toxic cultural failings as root causes.
As Cruise’s Chief People Officer, Hoffman was one of the senior executives responsible for shaping that culture. Barra served as chair of Cruise’s board throughout the debacle, though the independent review sidestepped the issue of board-level governance and oversight.
Prior to Cruise, Hoffman’s career was defined almost entirely by smaller tech outfits and specialized corporate teams, according to her LinkedIn profile. She spent roughly four years as Global Head of HR at Dropbox, which had around 3,100 employees during her tenure, and logged just over three years at Google in various HR roles. Her longest corporate tenure was a stint of more than seven years at Goldman Sachs in New York City, where she managed a 35-person team delivering internal training programs across 13 business units.
At Goldman, Hoffman served as co-chair of GALN, the bank’s gay and lesbian employee network. In a 2008 interview with The Glass Hammer, a career platform for professional women, she emphasized the importance of corporate affinity groups, explaining how fostering belonging and internal networking accelerates leadership development.
Networking opportunities were emphasized on Cruise’s website.
Yet under Hoffman’s HR stewardship at GM, long-tenured institutional and community leaders have found no shelter from callous downsizing. Among those who received GM’s infamous 5 a.m. “you are no longer needed” layoff emails was Adam Bernard, an MIT-trained engineer with a Harvard MBA who dedicated 38 years to the company. For 16 of those years, Bernard served as chair of GM PLUS, the company’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group.
Bernard’s abrupt firing ignited widespread anger across the automotive community, prompting prominent industry veterans to publicly denounce GM’s methods on Bernard’s LinkedIn page.
“This news is unbelievable to me and is compounded by the impersonal manner in which it was delivered,” posted John Maxgay, currently director of portfolio planning at Lucid Air and a former GM executive. “Your contributions to GM are legion, and you will be a major asset in your next role!”
“I don’t know what is more unbelievable; that they’ve resorted to such an impersonal methodology that lacks any semblance of compassion and treats employees who were once touted as part of a ‘family’ as nothing more than a means to an end, OR that this has taken place on the watch of some of the same Senior Leaders who once espoused the primary importance of integrity and trust,” posted Jeff Setting, GM’s former global vehicle chief engineer.
Hoffman, who holds a Wharton MBA and a BA in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, has already leveraged her GM stature to secure a board seat at UK-based education publisher Pearson, expanding her jet-setting profile overseas. She is one of two high-profile Bay Area executives to rapidly ascend under Barra. The other is Lin-Hua Wu, who was hired from Google to oversee corporate communications and subsequently elevated to Executive Vice President overseeing GM’s global marketing apparatus as well. Wu also previously worked at Dropbox.
Barra’s embrace of Silicon Valley talent extends well beyond Hoffman and Wu. A year ago, she recruited autonomy executive Dr. Sterling Anderson from the money-losing trucking autonomy company he co-founded with a compensation package worth as much as $40 million. Anderson reportedly rehired about 100 former Cruise employees GM previously let go. Anderson and his team are based in the Bay Area, where GM recently leased roughly 340,000 square feet of office space near Stanford University for its expanding California workforce.
Both Hoffman and Wu have been unabashed in their public praise of Mary Barra.
Young GM engineers and plant managers should take heed. If Howard’s reporting and Tuan Le’s lawsuit allegations accurately reflect modern-day GM, institutional knowledge and decades of faithful service may no longer offer the career protection they once did. At Mary Barra’s GM, demonstrating loyalty to Mary Barra may prove more valuable than demonstrating loyalty to the company.
As for Jack Welch, he eventually rejected the management philosophy that made him famous. In a 2009 interview with the Financial Times, he observed:
“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”